The American Dream vs. Reality Theme Analysis

Out of This Furnace is told from the perspective of the people who built America. American mythology, however, does not tell immigrant workers’ stories because their stories highlight the gulf between the promises of the American Dream and the struggles immigrants faced trying to realize that dream. The American Dream promises success regardless of birth or station in life to anyone willing to work to achieve it. Bell’s characters, however, learn that American society is stratified along lines of class and ethnicity—and, thus, that working hard just leads to more work. Kracha, Mike, and Dobie each have their own visions of the American Dream. Yet the former two fail while the latter succeeds because he understands that workers must challenge the steel industry’s hierarchical system in order to make the American Dream a reality for ordinary people.

Each section of Bell’s novel centers on the different visions his protagonists have for what constitutes the American Dream. As part of an oppressed minority in Austria-Hungary, that holds no “illusions about a land of freedom, a land where all men were equal,” Kracha believes “little men” cannot improve their lot. He distrusts “big men” and “rich men,” but he witnesses the power bosses hold over men in the steel mill and decides to emulate them by becoming his own boss. Kracha decides that the path to fulfilling the American Dream points to entrepreneurship. “Working in the mill I get nowhere,” Kracha says, “the way to get rich in America is to go into business.” He opens a butcher shop and has some initial success, which makes him feel at home among other business owners. In contrast to Kracha, Mike’s American Dream is to afford the luxury items that the well-off take for granted. “I want things I can’t have,” he tells Mary, including “a house with a front porch and a garden,” and “more money in my pocket.” Mikes wants the material trappings of the American Dream, the likes of which Kracha never hoped for. Unlike Kracha or Mike, Dobie believes in the power of collective action to achieve the American Dream, which he identifies as the right to bargain with the steel company for better wages and shorter hours. Dobie finds hope in the union and lobbies his fellow workers to join it because only by challenging America’s class hierarchies can the vast majority of people hope to live out the American Dream.

Both Kracha and Mike become disillusioned with the American Dream when they discover that all of the hard work they perform fails to make their situations any better. Despite Kracha’s early success with the butcher shop, a series of bad decisions and investments render him broke, sending him back to the mill “where I belong.” Kracha discovers that neither work nor business can make the American Dream a reality for a poor Slovak immigrant. Mike similarly concludes that the American Dream is a lie. Frustrated that his work leads nowhere, he complains to Mary that, “I have no more money in the bank than I had ten years ago.” The intensity with which Mike desires the American Dream clashes with the steel companies’ power and his status as a lowly “hunky.” He learns that the world is one of haves and have-nots because the haves make it so, and one man’s dreams are no match for the haves’ power. Like his predecessors, Dobie faces fierce opposition to his union organizing, but, unlike his father and grandfather, he does not give up. He realizes that the steel companies are the “giants” who destroy the “workers and builders,” and that if workers want a better future, they must build it themselves by taking on the giants.

Dobie understands that if workers collectively fight the oppressive system that gives bosses, owners, and politicians total power over workers’ destinies, the American Dram can be within reach. A fellow worker tells Dobie that politics affects everyone. Bell emphasizes that in order to benefit from American institutions, workers must make use of those institutions. Placing oneself outside of the fray, as Kracha did, leads nowhere. By 1937, Dobie becomes secretary of the union and helps bring the Congress of Industrial Organizations contracts to Braddock. Alongside his union work, Dobie realizes the dreams of his father, Mike, by purchasing the material trappings of a better life—like a refrigerator and a washing machine—that signify success in a growing consumer society. Through Dobie’s efforts, Bell makes clear that the American Dream must be fought for on multiple fronts against powerful interests determined to keep it a dream. All men in a plant must join a union; the union must enter politics and establish its own newspapers. Above all else, the workers must destroy the system of “bosses and bossism” and replace it with a system that recognizes the dignity of work and the value of leisure time.

Bell spends the majority of Out of This Furnace contrasting the ideal of the American Dream with the harsh reality of how industrial, political, and cultural power structures deny immigrant workers a chance at the American Dream. Bell’s point, however, is not that the American Dream is a sham. Instead, he concludes that only people who work to defeat the system in which “some men had virtual power of life and death over others” can achieve the American Dream. Only by systematically fighting the very interests who benefit from denying workers the American Dream will make that dream a reality for the majority of Americans.